There's something about family that seems to transcend every other set of decisions or moral imperatives you've made for yourself. Family has this amazing way of being the one thing in your life that, no matter how grown up you are, no matter how married you are, no matter how employed in a job that involves memos and secretaries you are, can make you act like a five-year-old. I think your family ends up creating more of the you that you know as you than any of those decisions, any of those religious leanings, any set of New Year's Eve resolutions or wedding-day vows. In large part, both genetically and developmentally, you are what your parents decided you would be (whether they meant to or not).

The trouble is, when you get married, you and all of the Uncle Harry's Temper and Mom's Monday Night Meatloaf that you have living inside of you has to combine with all of the Dad's Incessant Smoking and Grandma's Penchant for Buying Purses that your spouse has living inside her. Or, if you're less like poor writing and more like real life, you have Uncle Harry's Lasting Bad Touch on the inside of your thigh and Mom's Sociopathic Co-dependence living inside of you, and your spouse has Dad's Lack of Affection and Grandma's Repressed Sexuality living inside her. Either way, when you stand up there and say the most insanely short-sighted (and, by some miracle, the most wonderful) thing any two people can say to each other: "From this day forward," you promise to combine your internal families for the rest of your lives. All of the pathology, all of the neurosis, all of the praise and all of the neglect, all of the years of practice of being Daddy's girl or Mom's Worst Nightmare or the Angry Kid Who Wears Black to Piss His Parents Off come together in a bizarre marriage which will be spent working on defying the nature of your ubringings, indeed a large part of your very beings, in order to make the partnership work.

And you may succeed. I know I will. I will, at least, refuse to stop trying to succeed. We may find out we have more in common than we do in contrast between our families. And if we don't, we may find that our kids can overcome all of the Us that we didn't mean to give them, and hold tightly onto all the Us that we did.

...after all, they'll have to carry us around, too.

Peace,
Justin